>The model and inspiration of Green parties everywhere.
>>http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/germ-m23.shtml
This has to be qualified. The orginal Green Party was militantly anti-nuke,
but according to the cited article, it is now much more "realistic" given
the "realo" takeover of the party a decade ago:
===
In order to conceal this further rightward turn, the delegates elected a
new party chairperson by a large majority; someone who in the past always
defined herself as "coming from the left wing". With 92.5 percent of the
vote, Claudia Roth, a former manager of the rock band "Ton, Steine,
Scherben" (Clay, stones, shards), obtained a result that was unusually
harmonious for a Green party congress. As the chairperson of the
parliamentary Human Rights Committee, she had not infrequently publicly
criticised the inhumane immigration and refugee policies in Europe and also
in Germany, including those of the "Red-Green" coalition government. But
since her nomination as the second executive committee spokesperson
alongside Fritz Kuhn, she has proved her political pliancy.
For weeks, she negotiated with local Green federations in Lower Saxony,
which had opposed Green Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin's endorsement
of "castor" nuclear waste transports. Although nothing has changed
regarding the dangers posed by the transport of highly radioactive fuel
rods through densely populated areas, no discussion took place at the party
congress on the subject.
===
I suspect that the time for a purely "Green" party has come and gone. The
deepening crisis of capitalism points in the direction of tieing
environmental issues much more directly to issues such as imperialist war,
racism and unemployment. In any case, any socialist party that takes a
sneering attitude towards questions of water and air pollution,
environmental sustainability, atomic power, industrial farming, etc., has
no connection to the kind of Marxism that Marx and Engels practiced.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/